The Perfect Daughter (31 page)

‘Yes, ma'am. Never seen so many visitors so early on. A lot of invalid people for the air and gentlemen for the sailing and sea-fishing.'

There were more yachts and dinghies going out with the tide and half a dozen rowing boats near the opposite bank, some of them being rowed splashily in circles.

‘Are those rowing boats for hire?' A memory was nibbling at the edge of my mind.

‘Yes, ma'am, just in the estuary. You wouldn't want them going out to sea.'

Back in that railway carriage, Burton had accused me of taking Verona, drugged and helpless, up the estuary in a rowing boat. He or somebody had worked it out very neatly for me. Did they know there were rowing boats for hire, or was that just a lucky guess? The ferry arrived and grounded on the pebbles. With most people at lunch, I was the only passenger back to the Teignmouth side. The ferryman, a lad of sixteen or so, pushed off from the beach with a long oar and started the motor. As we curved out across the estuary I looked back at Shaldon and the red sandstone cliff that local people called the Ness. A small white house, mostly built of white-painted wood, was tucked under the Ness just above the tide-line, with steps running down to the jetty. It looked familiar, then I remembered I'd seen it in the background of one of the photographs of Verona in a dinghy.

‘Who lives there?'

‘The admiral.' He mumbled the words to his chest, less at ease with people than with boats.

‘Admiral Pritty?'

‘Yes.'

There were sandbanks at the mouth of the estuary, exposed by the receding tide. An odd-shaped boat, like a little Noah's Ark, seemed to have grounded on the furthest of them. I'd have asked the lad about it, only he was turning the boat again to bring the stern up against the beach on the Teignmouth side, among fish barrels and nets spread out to dry.

‘Do you know where I could make a telephone call from?'

He thought about it while he fixed the gangplank. ‘The big hotels would have them, the Royal or the Queens.'

The Royal was some way from the fishermen's beach in the fashionable part of the town. It faced the promenade across lawns and flowerbeds planted out in the demented patterns that seaside park-keepers love, clashing pink and red begonias, mauve blobs of ageratum and silver houseleeks crammed together as elaborate as a Persian carpet. Perhaps it's a reaction against all that unruliness of the sea just a pebble's throw away. The foyer of the Royal was sunk in afternoon calm and the man behind the mahogany reception desk shook his head when I asked if they had a telephone I could use.

‘Residents only, ma'am.'

*   *   *

It took a half-crown tip and an order for tea and crab sandwiches I didn't want to get access to the telephone booth under the stairs. I leaned against the door that wouldn't shut properly and asked the operator for the number of the tea importer under Bill's chambers. The importer's secretary answered, annoyed, but agreed to go upstairs and get him. There was a long wait, then footsteps hurrying downstairs and the sound of the receiver being picked up.

‘Bill? It's Nell.'

A silence, and somehow the embarrassment of it came down the line from Manchester.

‘Miss Bray?'

The voice of Bill's clerk. The disappointment told me how much I'd wanted to talk to Bill.

‘Yes.'

‘Is Mr Musgrave with you, Miss Bray?'

‘What?'

The surprise in my voice made him think he'd offended me and he started trying to apologise.

‘It occurred to us that he might be … might be visiting friends in London. I didn't mean to…'

‘Isn't he there?'

Another silence then, miserably, ‘No, no he isn't. We're becoming quite worried. In fact…'

A tap on the door. A waiter was hovering outside with a trayful of tea and sandwiches. I signed to him to go away.

‘Have you been to his lodgings?'

‘Yes, I cycled out there at lunchtime. His landlady said he left for the weekend on Friday morning and she hasn't seen him since.'

The telephone booth went dark round me. The phone felt clammy in my hand.

‘He hasn't been in today?'

‘No, and he had appointments with clients. It's not like him. Not like him at all. I thought if he'd gone to London, perhaps he'd called on you and…'

‘I'm not in London, I'm in Devon. He was here on Saturday.'

I think the clerk misunderstood that, because when he spoke again he sounded even more embarrassed.

‘Did he tell you where he was going?'

‘No, I wasn't here when he was. I just got here today and … oh God. Did he say anything to you or the landlady about what he was doing?'

‘Only that he wouldn't be into chambers on Friday.'

More silence, apart from crackling on the line. When the clerk spoke again his voice was beginning to distort and go faint.

‘Are you still there, Miss Bray?'

‘Yes. Look, I'll make some enquiries down here … try to find out…'

‘I'm sorry, I can't hear…'

‘I'll try to telephone later.'

I was shouting by that time, but the line had gone dead. In the foyer, the waiter had put the tea and sandwiches on a table beside a parlour palm and was standing guard over them. I gulped tea.

‘Was there a man named Musgrave staying here on Friday or Saturday night?'

‘Reception would know, ma'am.'

Reception was quite sure that nobody of Bill's name or description had stayed at the Royal. They'd been fully booked on both nights and couldn't have taken any new arrivals. In any case, it didn't strike me as Bill's sort of hotel, but then what did I know?

*   *   *

In the next two hours I tramped round about thirty hotels and guesthouses with no result except sore feet and a collection of suspicious looks ranging from mildly curious, through satirical to downright hostile. A woman enquiring after a tall dark-haired man at a holiday resort provokes obvious reactions. The maid at Sea View said she'd been looking for a man like that most of her life and to let her know if I found out where they sold them. The proprietor of a public house that did rooms puffed whisky vapours in my face and said, ‘Gone off, has he? Don't worry, he'll be back with his tail between his legs when her husband catches up with them.' A thin woman at the Tamarisks, or it might have been White Horses or Balmoral (they all looked the same), burst into tears and said hers had walked out last Christmas and I'd be better off without him in the long run.

Towards the end of the afternoon, when the musicians on the bandstand were packing up their instruments and families loaded with picnic baskets and buckets and spades were trailing from the beach back to their boarding houses, I stood on the promenade and registered total failure. The tide had turned by then but the sea was still a long way out, the beach patchily inhabited by picnic parties and family groups playing cricket and rounders. A couple of ponies were at work dragging the bathing machines back up the sand out of reach of the night's high tide, the painted huts rocking and lurching on their big metal wheels. Fishermen were digging for worms down at the tide-line. A dog ran up and down barking at the waves.

Then there were the two policemen. I didn't notice them at first but other people on the promenade were staring in their direction and perhaps somebody said something, not sounding alarmed, just curious, amused even. They were to the left of the pier, the part of the beach set aside for women's bathing, so perhaps that had caused the amusement. They walked side by side along the sand, not hurrying. My throat went tight. I started walking fast along the promenade, past the pier, down some steps to the beach. The policemen were still walking quite slowly. They were heading for a man in a navy-blue jersey who was standing waiting for them on the high tide-line of driftwood and dry bladderwrack. There was something odd and skeletal beside him that wasn't driftwood but I couldn't make out what it was. The policemen reached him and stood there, screening it. By then I was running, stumbling over dry uneven sand. People who'd been nearer the scene when the policemen arrived were already gathering, children and dogs with them.

‘What is it? What's happened?'

The man in the navy-blue jersey was thin and grey-bearded. He was explaining something to the policemen, making gestures out to sea. Beside him was the skeletal thing, just two big iron wheels joined by an axle. Nothing else.

A woman answered me, ‘Someone's taken one of his bathing machines.'

I felt weak with relief, laughed too loudly. ‘Is that all? I thought it was somebody hurt.' Or worse. I hadn't admitted it to myself till then.

She was annoyed with me for laughing. ‘Sheer devilment, what those boys get up to. Hacked it right off its wheels and now it's stuck out there on the sandbank.' She pointed out to the mouth of the estuary and the shape I'd taken for a stranded boat. ‘If it doesn't come in again on the next tide, he'll have to pay somebody to go out and get it off.'

An old man said those boys would be cutting down the pier next and a general debate started on what should be done about them, with a good thrashing being the most popular option. The owner of the missing bathing machine was still describing his loss to the police, showing the wooden struts attached to the wheel axle, where the wooden changing-hut had been hacked free.

I left them to it and walked slowly back to the promenade. My heart had slowed down but it still scared me that I'd been so ready to think of drownings. Back on the other side of the pier people were strolling among flowerbeds or queuing outside the Riviera Cinema for the early evening show. There were a few guesthouses I hadn't tried in a street round the corner from the Royal. At the first two the landladies were busy making dinner and unhelpful. The third came to the door in an apron with a smudge of flour on her nose and at least stood and listened while I described Bill for what felt like the thousandth time.

‘Yes, he was here.'

I was so used to ‘no' that it didn't strike me at first.

‘Here? He stayed here? When?'

‘Not stayed. Friday evening, it was. He came here only I didn't have a room because we were all booked up with families. He said did I know anywhere and I told him most places in town were full but he might try down by the back beach. There are a few places there that take in people who've come for the fishing.'

*   *   *

The back beach was the local name for the inside of the sand bar that curved round to make a harbour at the estuary mouth. I'd already been there once when I got off the ferry. It was the artisans' part of the town, where the fishermen and boatbuilders lived and worked, and cargo boats came in and out of the docks at high tide. Narrow streets stopped abruptly at either red sand or lapping water, depending on the state of the tide. There were a few fishing boats tied up, a smell of fish on the warm air and under it a colder earthy whiff from the pale heaps of china clay waiting on the dockside to be shipped to the ends of the earth. The houses were mostly in scrappy terraces of three or four, huddled among tall net lofts or store sheds. Although they looked hardly large enough for families, quite a few had ‘Room to Let' signs in the windows. Nobody answered my knock at the first cottage with a sign. At the second there was a long silence then the door opened and a brown-haired woman in her mid-twenties was standing in the doorway.

‘Yes. What is it?'

Her voice wasn't local. She was holding a pen and had a distracted air.

‘I'm sorry to bother you, but I see you have a Room to Let sign and…'

She sighed then turned away from me and called up the narrow flight of stairs, ‘John, is the room free or isn't it?'

‘What's that?' A man appeared at the top of the stairs, equally distracted-looking. He wore an old tweed jacket and glasses, and was carrying a jam-jar full of cloudy water with a silvery worm inside it.

‘She wants the room. Is it free?'

‘I don't know. Did he say if he was coming back?'

I said, ‘May I come in, please?'

They both stared at me, he from the top of the stairs, she from the bottom.

‘I think the man you're talking about may be a friend of mine. I'm looking for him. I've been looking for him all day.'

I suppose I must have looked and sounded desperate because they let me in. The downstairs room where we talked, looking on to the harbour, was more like an aquarium than a place where human beings lived. There were shelves all round the walls with tanks containing a few lethargic fish, a wooden laboratory bench against the wall with a clerk's writing stool alongside it, a smell of fish and formaldehyde. The woman, who seemed a more forceful character than the man and annoyed at being interrupted, waved a hand at the tanks and explained, ‘Marine parasites. John's doing research. He has to be near the harbour for when the fishing boats get in.'

‘The man who was staying with you, was that last Friday night?'

They looked at each other blankly. John pushed his spectacles up and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

‘Probably, yes.'

‘Had he just arrived from Manchester?'

Another pair of blank looks. The woman said, ‘I suppose he'd just arrived from somewhere because I think he said all the hotels were full. We don't get many people on the whole because of the smell.'

‘And he took a room here?'

‘Yes. We explained about not doing breakfast and he said it didn't matter because he'd be out early in the morning anyway.'

‘And was he?'

‘Yes. He stayed out all day. He got back in the evening and asked if he could take the room for another night.'

‘Did he say why?'

‘I don't think so. We didn't ask him, did we, John?'

Her manner wasn't as brisk as it had been. She was beginning to sense something wrong.